I have a take on this. As technology makes it cheaper to distribute things (I'm thinking all the way from printing press to VHS to streaming) the target audience grows. Each revolution in distribution broadens the pool of consumers. A book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people. Today, many (or most?) people can afford a Netflix account. Almost any Western person can watch a Tiktok video. I'm not trying to say that richer people are somehow better than the average person but I hope it's fair to say that, as media can reach more and more people, the target audience becomes less "sophisticated".
> book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people
Those people also had to compete, in the long run, for their positions. Broadening scope from a selected sample to the population necessarily degrades quality as the common denominator is pursued.
On the other hand, it creates tremendous wealth which allows niche art to flourish. (On the third hand, populism hates niche art.)
With EVs the focus becomes how wonderful they are because they do not burn fossil fuels in their engines. Great, but what about what all the other issues (including non renewable issues in the rest of the supply chain involved in building the EV)? They're greenwashed away - no need to discuss public transit and densification. EVs will fix everything and we don't need to change our life on any significant way.
They are a way to continue going down the wrong path and feel good about it.
I’m not 100% on this but the way I understood this is by analogy to the 2D surface of the Earth. The surface of the Earth is finite yet has no reachable edge. The universe is the same in 3D. Like if the Earth grew then there would be more land but still no more or less “edge” of the world, and the same could hold for the universe. That said I think this is one theory rather than accepted fact?
This would mean the universe has positive curvature. Experimental evidence points towards the universe being flat (zero curvature), though there is some margin for error that could go either way (positive or negative curvature).
In particular, almost none of them are isotropic. The assumption that the universe is isotropic is part of the cosmological principle and the foundation of modern cosmology. It's a very natural assumption to make, so the vast majority of cosmologists are quite comfortable with it, but at the end of the day it's just an assumption that could be wrong.
In the case of a universe of finite size, this analogy explains how there can be such a thing as a finite space without there being boundaries provided the space is (slightly) curved.
So this has less to do with an infinitely sized universe and more with the question of “What exists beyond the edge of the universe if it would be finite in size?”
So `status pls` means: call the function status (which leaves its results on the stack) and print the top of the stack with new-lines (multiple lines if it's an array).
Then `status upcase pls` would do something like the above, but it calls a "to uppercase" function before printing.
While I think 'pl' and 'pls' for print line and print lines is probably an excellent choice overall I can't help but see 'pls' and try and parse it as an abbreviated INTERCAL.
